


no room for imagining, 'cause everyone's seen everything

by r1ker



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 08:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3375077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r1ker/pseuds/r1ker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it's stakeout night, that one fated day of the week they both dread, being trapped in the same car for nine hours waiting on someone to fuck up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> yee yee
> 
> (there's also a west wing reference in here, i like to think jim likes the west wing just like me)
> 
> ((all pop culture references belong to their respective owners, i own nothing but the tears on my keyboard, blah))

Jim sighs as he looks at his calendar to today and the words across the box, filled completely with Harvey's hideous handwriting. "STAKEOUT." It's like it's yelling at him to beware of the stakeout, to tread gently around its never-ending spiral of sleeping in shifts, eating shit that probably wouldn't fit in at the dump, and aching from head to toe from being shoved into the same position for ten hours. 

Jim's always been beware of the stakeout. He's fidgety when kept in the same place for a long time. Ask his parents, road trips when he was little were completely unbearable if they didn't happen to have strategically-placed breaks to let six-year-old Jim run off energy that had been pent up for so long, his legs couldn't stop moving with it. 

Now he's older and a little calmer, but still itching with the thought of sitting for so long as he waits on Harvey to arrive. He was told at three that afternoon by Harvey that he'd need to run home for a minute and pick up some things. Lucky. Jim was stuck with the cases of those who decided to bolt on Friday, tying up loose ends between domestic disputes and filling out endless paperwork. 

Harvey delivers on his promise, strolling in at seven with a backpack slung over his shoulder. Jim's sprawled out at his desk, slumped down in his chair with his legs stretched out beneath his table. He's not got much he needs for the stakeout; he doesn't like to bring a lot to distract him. He's just got enough in his dad's old fanny pack to keep him sane for the next few hours. There's a set of earbuds, sleep medication, foam earplugs, a bag of Tootsie Rolls (his stress food, the feel of the candy between his teeth can take the edge off whatever anger Harvey's bound to provide later in the night). Just the essentials for Jim - no frills.

"Alright, let's get out there, Jim, before I die," Harvey says, grabbing his coat off of the back of his chair and lingering in the doorway. Jim follows closely behind, already starting to jam the earplugs in his ears.

 

It starts off fine. They find a great spot to settle in and wait on their subject of the week, one Leonard Dove. According to the case file open on Jim's lap, Dove's been wanted for some drug trafficking coming out of this area of town. It's best to nip these small connections in the bud before they find their way to Mooney's runnings. Dove's not connected to Fish in any way, according to their intel, but somehow, the little peddlers seem to find their way into her embrace. They're enticed with Fish's promises of immense riches if they join with her, and are soon left hanging as she and her crew reap the benefits. However, Dove's been getting more violent as he tries to find a place in the underworld. Roughed up a few who dared to question his intent, even kidnapped another guy to beat some sense into him for, oh, thirteen hours.

This is the chance for Jim and Harvey to get a little closer to Mooney. Word has it from their insiders, fearless and naive motherfuckers who infiltrate the outer circles of the ring for seemingly meaningless dirt and feed it back to them, Mooney's calling Dove in for a meeting on this particular night. That's why they're here, Harvey in the driver's seat and Jim in the shotgun, watching out for any sign of a slip-up and a chance to get one step ahead of them. 

There's music playing lightly on the radio, too tinny to catch words or melodies, but enough to provide a background noise to break the silence. Jim's also snuck a book into this stakeout, since Harvey is so engrossed in watching out, it's a perfect opportunity to catch up on reading. Tonight, it's _Please Kill Me_ , a book he hasn't touched since the academy but was appealing for tonight. The stories of Iggy Pop's endeavors both on and off the stage draw Jim in. Legs McNeil takes great care in describing the encounters, sometimes leaving Jim confused as to who was fucking who, who was dating who, in the haphazard early years of modern punk music. 

Harvey's got the driver's seat reclined back and is staring at the ceiling of the car, earbuds in his ears and hands drumming softly on his thighs. Jim's looking up at the doorways in the alley and at Harvey, eyes never ceasing to take stock of the situation, should their temporary carelessness get the best of them. 

"You ever heard the story about the time the Stooges opened up for Cream in '68?" Jim asks him, and Harvey jolts a little, leans up and takes out his earbuds to catch what Jim's saying.

"What?" Harvey asks, a little bewildered.

"It says right here, Iggy spent the day taking a 200 gallon oil drum from Ann Arbor to Detroit to use it for a mike stand and then the crowd didn't want them, they wanted Cream, and Iggy spent most of it high on acid and screaming 'Fuck you' to the crowd. Can you imagine that? Waiting for your first big break, opening for a pretty popular band, only to be blown off by a bunch of unreceptive fucks?" Jim laments. "That happened a lot, the Stooges opened for crowds that didn't understand their style of music and they mostly booed at them. Jesus."

"God, did you just turn sixteen again?" Harvey asks him dryly. Jim rolls his eyes and keeps on reading. "That was the most scintillating analysis of a book that basically takes three hundred pages to describe the amount of times rock singers got high and fucked each other."

"Well, goddammit if sixteen year old me didn't enjoy every last fucking word of it," Jim refutes, jamming his finger in the spine of the book to keep track of the page. "I don't have a lot of books that aren't about this job, so let me live, would you please?"

"Gladly, Mr. Groupie," Harvey snorts. Harvey puts his earbuds back in and listens to his music, thumbs through a few news apps feigning a series of yawns.

 

The clock on Jim's phone warns of the approaching and critical hour, 11:00. Jim shoves a Post-It on the last page of the chapter in his book, throws it down to the floorboards to keep track of any sighting of Dove, or better yet, Mooney herself. Jim dismisses the last possibility as a cosmic miracle should she decide to appear in the flesh. A few of her cronies make an appearance at half past, chat one another up before moving off to better territory.

Jim decides to settle in for the few hours he can sleep and rustles in his fanny pack for half an Ambien. He swallows it with a quarter of a bottle of water and leans back, shoves his neck pillow behind his head and puts his jacket on backwards to serve as a blanket. Harvey hears him moving around and takes his earbuds out once more and watches him calm down to go to sleep. The way he's watching Jim, Jim can see out of the corner of his eye, and thinks it oddly observant and soft. Jim dismisses it and moves his head to the right, the only way he can fall asleep in a car. 

Jim sleeps lightly but sufficiently, dreaming of nothing but the inside of his eyelids. He barely registers something heavy but soft settling in on him, and his fuzzy mind, for a second, thinks it to be Harvey's backpack. Bastard. Jim isn't even awake and Harvey's laying things on him like a bench in a hallway. Jim slips out of unconsciousness long enough to feel a hood of a jacket at his nose. It's not his, the smell all different and complex. He catches notes of Hugo Boss along with the scent of pure man, and by God, if it isn't Harvey's jacket over him. It's warm, too, thick enough to cover Jim up from the cold that's seeping in through the imperfect seals in the windows. He looks over and sees Harvey resting too, arms folded over his chest and eyes half-lidded. He's just slipping off to sleep, Jim notices, and stifles a smile. It's a goddamn shame how handsome Harvey is, face still devastatingly handsome under the scruff of beard over his mouth and neck. 

Jim gives himself one last glance of Harvey's face before going back to bed.

 

He wakes up again at two in the morning. The streets outside are quiet and damp, the only sounds being the horns and traffic nearby as night Gotham awakes and subsists. Harvey's awake now, rubbing his eyes and cracking his fingers as he tries to drag his mind from the hold of sleep. 

"Anything?" Harvey grumbles.

Jim shakes his head and shoves his arms into the sleeves of Harvey's jacket. 

"It's a quiet night, they're not wanting to cause any trouble." Harvey looks over and sees Jim's in his jacket and he smiles. "You were shivering, don't pretend like I'm getting soft. It was loud - your teeth were clattering." Jim rolls his eyes and Harvey snorts. The two keep on peering out of the windshield at the outside city, taking note of anything and everything.

 

Four a.m. brings on a sudden change in Jim's demeanor towards Harvey. Over the last two hours, the two have talked, played an impromptu game of virtual Trivial Pursuit on Jim's phone, named of every cast member of the original West Side Story, and still are nowhere with talking one-on-one about the ever-present relations between them. Jim's ill to admit he's always thought Harvey was hot, you know, the whole burly and gruff thing worked for him. And tailored precisely to Jim's likings. Hell, Jim knew he was bi in the army, in the academy. He loved all types of men, he couldn't get enough of any one group of them, but his favorites were ones that were big and tough, rough riders that suddenly went soft when Jim worked his charm. Harvey was just that, without the whole softness, but enough to leave Jim interested. Only Jim was getting tired of the limbo he'd put himself in when he and his mind had a conference and confirmed yes, Harvey was undoubtedly attractive and a winner. 

"Where are you at with Barb?" Harvey asks to break the ice.

"She's still at her mother's and she's not quite sure where to go next. She wants to move out, she knows that, but she doesn't know when." Jim starts to shed his coat cocoon, wriggles his arms out of the folds to stretch and twist.

"Sorry about that," Harvey provides genuinely. Jim looks at him blankly. 

"It's fine, I just... it gets bad at home sometimes," Jim confesses and Harvey turns in his seat to listen. "I work a lot and she's busy too, no doubt about that. She does things on her own and so do I and after a while, we found out there's no way that those two things could cross over to something we both liked. There's this old character on a TV show, he and his wife were having troubles, subsequently divorced, and they based it off the fact that they couldn't say anything to each other other than why they couldn't live with each other. And Barb and I found ourselves doing that. We'd talk about all the little things we did that the other couldn't stand. She hated it when I left my razor on the side of the sink, I hated it when she left her lipstick tissues on the counter in the kitchen. It was little things, and then it turned into how we were both absent and knew nothing about each other."

Harvey's gawking at him now. He feels so bad for Jim, he thought everything was fine between them. He'd seen her a few times in the station and how she stood in such glory of Jim and he the same for her. It's a goddamn shame it was in ruins behind the scenes. Jim looks genuinely upset now and he stops talking, takes to knotting and unknotting the empty sleeve of his hoodie. 

"That's why I got divorced," he confesses. "We soon found that we hated each other and didn't want to go through with it anymore. It was too much, coming home to the same thing, yelling at each other and talking of nothing but hate."

"This is the first day all week I haven't been tiptoeing around someone," Jim says. "I haven't been asked a single question I was afraid to answer with something rude."

"I'm glad me being quiet hasn't bothered you," Harvey provides. "I'm sorry I've been an asshole this week."

Jim looks at him and Harvey's enamored with how his eyes clear, the cloud of speaking about Barbara fading away. "It's been a bad week. I was the same way and I feel like an asshole too."

They nod gently, silently agreeing with one another. For once in their tumultuous partnership, the air is clear. 

"I've also been a little afraid to talk to you, since I realized something," Harvey adds to his statement. Jim's confused all of a sudden. It's not Harveyesque in the slightest to behave like this. "I've liked you, obviously not in the beginning, but you've grown on me. It's not been easy these last few weeks but you've made it better for me to come to work. I used to dread coming to that shithole and then you blew onto the scene, and the reason I was snippy at you was I was completely overwhelmed with how you approached things. It's been a big adjusting period since you came but I can safely say that I wouldn't have anyone else as my partner." He leans over the console between them to get closer to Jim. The air's so heavy Jim's struggling for breath, chest depressing in the search for breathable air. Harvey leans in and his nose touches Jim's. Jim startles a little and leans back, so does Harvey in response, but the two eventually come back together, and Jim's breath is stolen once more as Harvey's mouth covers his. 

Jim's hands come up to Harvey's face immediately, cradle his jaw and revel in the scratch of hair against the palms of his hands. Harvey's hands are on his neck, holding him here in the car and not anywhere else his mind wants him to be. Harvey kisses him until his lungs burn for air and Jim has to pull away before this whole ordeal causes his harm. 

"Good?" Harvey asks him and Jim nods, ready to delve back in for more and avoid the world around him, mind heady with the sense of being with his partner, not with anything else life wants to throw at him.

It's good for once, and his legs don't want to twitch impatiently anymore. His legs are just fine now, here in the car with Harvey, on yet another stakeout. 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dove doesn't quite get away and harvey potentially gets laid. a soliloquy in two parts.

Jim's got his face nestled in the crook of Harvey's neck and he's just breathing, taking in Harvey's scent, his very presence. Harvey's working kisses down his shoulders, the curve of his spine, the crook behind his ears where no one else thought to look of as a place of true affection. Jim's breathing picks up when Harvey shrugs off Jim's jacket, plucks away the buttons of his shirt to reveal his torso to the air. He's also doing the same to himself, and soon they're both sitting in the car half-naked in undershirts.

Harvey's got warm hands cradling Jim's shoulder blades, tipping him back to expose Jim's chest. Jim goes along with it, hands threading through Harvey's hair, encouraging but holding. He laughs a little, out of breath but still a bit amused by the fact that _they're doing this in the patrol car_ , where criminals ride when they've committed ultimate wrongs, but this feels right. Harvey's now starting to pick up on just how right Jim thinks it is, and buries his teeth into the soft flesh padding Jim's collarbones.

Jim gasps and slides back on the door, legs swiveling up to rest on either side of the console for leverage. Harvey's got one knee in between Jim's legs and he's starting to engulf Jim's very being, large and heavy and warm and here all at the same time. It's the kind of thing Jim's looking for, that sort of all consuming presence that sparks a fire in Jim's blood like no other.

Jim's been hard since they started kissing - it's sad how the little shit like that gets him started now - but now he's even more so with his partner marking him to an inch of his life. His head's hitting the passenger window and he's eating it up, pulling and tugging on Harvey's hair in an attempt to get this to speed up a little in hopes of some sort of relief. But Harvey just holds steady, works on sucking a bruise into Jim's breastbone. One sharp tug gets Harvey a little more responsive, this time with a groan that vibrates against Jim's eardrums with its potency. 

"You like having your hair pulled, don't you," Jim breathes out, inching his legs a little further apart to allow Harvey some more room to move down. "Do you like being slapped and shit? Nipple tassels and stuff like that? 'Cause I can do that. It'd be weird and I'd probably start laughing halfway through, but it could be a done deal if you just give me the word, partner." Harvey laughs, a quiet vibration against Jim's skin, and keeps on going. Harvey suddenly pulls Jim up by the ass and into his lap, a swing that leaves Jim a little dizzy.

This time Jim gets to look at Harvey in the face and they snicker at each other when they both seem to ponder the juvenile nature of their doings. Necking in a car with the windows fogging up wasn't what they had planned to do on this stakeout but they went with it anyway. For one detective pushing fifty and the other pushing forty, it was high time they got in a little excitement before the job went entirely too dry to finish properly. Harvey smiles at him and it's bright, a little shit eating, and all charm when he leans in to kiss Jim properly, hands on his shoulders and toes curling in his boots. Jim starts to wriggle his pants down, kneeling up on Harvey's thighs to dug down the slacks to give him just enough room to breathe. Harvey eases him on, tugs down his own pants to where they're both sitting pretty on the leather seat. Harvey runs his fingers along the creases of Jim's thighs, where they join at the hip, just taking it in. Jim's hands are holding on Harvey's wrists, keeping him right there.

Harvey puts both of his hands on Jim's ass again, takes in a good squeeze, and lifts him up. Jim's cock's rubbing on Harvey's stomach and it's a little uncomfortable as far as position. Jim just waits, hands grasping the headrest and looking out the back window to the quiet streets of Gotham, where their sights are supposed to be but instead they're on each other. 

"Wanna fuck or?" Harvey asks bluntly, looking a little too frazzled to play around. Jim looks him in the eyes and they're going black, rings of hazel being swallowed up by fiery black. 

"Yeah, that's fine, just take it easy," Jim answers, warning. Harvey leans over just then and fumbles in his backpack. Jim just waits on him, snakes a hand down to his cock to offer a little relief. He's gasping when Harvey comes back with a condom and lube. Jim leans the seat back and Harvey jolts, goes along for the ride as he's reclined down to rest on the bench of the back seat. "It'd make it easier, I promise. I'm like dead weight when it comes to shit like this, sorry."

"No, it's fine, I was just about to do that anyways," Harvey adds, lubing up three of his fingers. Jim gasps when Harvey just goes in with one, fingernails digging into the meat of Harvey's shoulders. The one time Jim did this - the army, in a sandy tent, both of them laughing when someone got an elbow to the face, and the blood and tears were too much to go on once it was done - it was so long ago, he forgot the feel and burn of another man's fingers in his ass. One becomes two and then to three, and Jim's just about ready to crack. Harvey's rolling on the condom by now, and Jim can tell. The sound he makes when it goes on is enough to make Jim groan too. Soon Harvey's pushing in and Jim's head frozen turned at the ceiling, jaw loose in a quiet gasp. Jim's got one knee on the console and another on a plastic bump in the lining of the door and he's rocking back and forth experimentally, just to get a feel. It hasn't been that long since the army and soon the feel of it comes back to him and he's overcome with sensation, orgasm burning in his groin and his stomach. He can tell this isn't going to last long. 

Harvey's moving with him too, knees bending enough to match Jim thrust for thrust. Jim's head's to his chest to keep from spearing through the short roof of the car and he's groaning with each shove of Harvey's cock. Jim's hands move from Harvey's shoulders to his chest, anchoring him to the reclined seat. It goes like this for a good ten minutes, a shit ton longer than both of them are used to, and they're both surprised by just how much they're getting out of this. It's an amalgamation of feelings all at once, the slide of skin and limbs. 

"Oh, fuck," Jim groans when he knows he's about to come, dangling on the precipice of tension and relief, feet scraping at the intangible surface. His skin's burning from the top of his head to his socked feet. Bumps burst on his forearms from the unexpected chill and his senses, all five of the fuckers, betraying him with the smell and feel and sight of Harvey fucking him, are completely overwhelmed by this. His knees dig in hard and he moans as he comes, getting it up his chest and down his legs. Harvey follows shortly thereafter with a stifled grunt. 

They're both sitting there and heaving with breath, Jim even more so than Harvey, and it takes a few minutes of nonverbal recollection for the two of them to come back to themselves. Harvey pulls Jim down into a kiss, one entirely as passionate as the ones before. Jim lies down on Harvey's chest and just relaxes for a moment, before he sees a familiar figure slinking around a corner. There's Leonard Dove in all his glory, shuffling some money around in one hand and palming a throwaway cell phone in the other.

"We're gonna have to make this afterglow real short because I think I see Dove. Do not jump or startle, your cock is still firmly up my ass, have some compassion for the one you just fucked the life out of, would you please," Jim deadpans. Jim eases down off from Harvey's lap slowly, winces at the feel, and tugs his clothes back on. Just as they're both about to get out of the car, still looking a little starstruck with rumpled clothes, Jim leans over and kisses Harvey again, this time short, this time sweet. Harvey pulls away and his mouth's tingling with the absence of Jim's, and they get out of the car with Harvey still feeling dumbstruck.

And off they go.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had a rough day - i lost one of my speaking competitions - and i felt like writing to make myself feel better

**Author's Note:**

> i have "please kill me" and just like how i write jim thinking about it, it's interesting as hell.
> 
> how much pop culture can i cram into one story, i ask myself


End file.
